


Don't Look Back (A Modern Myth)

by QueerGirlTakeover



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Hollstein - Freeform, it's a greek myth y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 12:41:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3290696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueerGirlTakeover/pseuds/QueerGirlTakeover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura used the sword, and the sword consumed her. Carmilla will do anything to get her back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Look Back (A Modern Myth)

_It is a sword meant to consume anyone who uses it._

Carmilla buries her face in her hands, the words a refrain against her skull. _It is a sword_. She sees the sword in Laura's hands, remembers the way Laura had shoved her aside, stolen it from her hands before she could even realize what was happening. _Anyone_. “My turn for heroic crap,” she'd said, and Carmilla watched in horror, reached out a minute too late, hand grasping air a millisecond after it was vacated. _Who uses it._ Laura leapt, pushed off the edge of the chasm, the sword like a hole in space between her fingers. The nothingness of the sword wrapped tendrils up her arms like vines, sank into her skin until she too was becoming nothing. Laura drove the blade down, fell into the gap and plunged it into the center, into the heart of the light. Carmilla remembers someone screaming Laura's name, the sound echoing against the stone walls, turning from one into ten into a hundred into a thousand voices. It might have been her. The nothingness of the sword spread into Laura's chest, down her legs, reached inside her, through her body into her soul as the light expanded and shook and Carmilla closed her eyes against the blinding bright. The light died with a blackness so sudden Carmilla could feel it shudder through her. She heard the clatter of metal against the bottom of the now empty chasm and when she'd leaned over, she saw the sword laying there. A hollow in reality. _Meant to consume._

Carmilla is not one for inaction. Nothing is impossible, she tells herself, the sword like a dark beacon in a box beneath her bed. There are only so many ancient spellbooks, and Carmilla has an eternity. She learns secrets she didn't know were secrets, she learns of depths and heights in dimensions she never dreamed could exist. She is a soul of grief layered in determination, her center made of memories she tries not to touch.

When she finds it, she is half asleep, barely notices what it is she's read before she stops herself from turning the page. On death, on resurrection, so many books tell her how to restore a soul to a body but none can teach her how to retrieve a body lost to a dimension Carmilla cannot touch. The words on the page are everything she has searched for.

Her unbeating heart quickens, the adrenaline like pins through her veins, she becomes after so many years of quiet, impatience. It has been too long, it has been an eternity of its own. The book urges caution, others urge reckless abandon, others warn not to touch death with magic, with living fingers and Carmilla reminds herself that she is not alive. And she has been an empty undeath for every second following Laura's disappearance.

She imagines the sword under the bed shudders. She lays a hand on the case, dreams she can feel it humming, dreams it is discontent.

“I defy you,” she tells it. “I am nothing you have ever faced.” The sword is never quiet.

She pulls space apart, tears a whole in it, a gap to the underworld, the rift from life to death. The entrance she creates is a dark pit of stairs, wreathed in mist, a descent into a world not under but atop, within, around, the world in which she lives. Each footstep is a raindrop into a lake, and the instant she passes through, it closes behind her. No way but forward.

Feet move from steps to running, to leaping down ten stairs at once, to the memories she is letting run wild inside of her. Impatience runs fingers along her spine _she has waited so long for this._ The grief is not gone. It is not diminished. There is not a moment she does not despair. Hope hides behind her impatience, peeks out between the cracks. Sometimes Carmilla believes she can hear voices, sense presences just beyond her eyesight, just beyond earshot.

The palace of the gods rises before her so quickly she almost crashes into the gates, tall and green in the darkness. Mist gathers and dissipates around them, like breath. They swing open, waiting, expectant. As Carmilla steps through, her grief comes crashing down on top of her. She cannot feel hope in this place. It is not a hopeless place, but a place of no hope. She does not know how she can feel the distinction. She knows it is there.

The gods sit in the entrance hall, on thrones of welded metal and the slow passage of time. One beside the other, one a dark lord, the other a pale lady. Both watch her unblinkingly, with eyes of inevitability. Both hold scepters, one an endless hourglass, the other a fruit, relentlessly ripening and whithering.

When they ask her what she wants, their voices are together a river and a field, empty and full. They ask why she has come into their domain. They ask her who she is and she finds she does not know.

She feels her task in her grief, and before them begs for Laura's life, body and soul, to be returned with her to the world of the living. They do not move while she speaks, and in their silence is a certainty of denial, of uselessness, of the cold truth that death is inescapable. She offers her immortality to them in exchange, offers them her eventual soul for time in life with another. They are unmoved. They say her soul has not been stolen from them, that she was never intended to be theirs. They do not want her immortality. They have enough of their own.

The lord asks why they should grant her such a thing. The release of a soul, the revocation of a death, is not a thing done lightly, he says. She is not the only one who wants love returned. She is not the only one who has knelt before them in this hall.

The lady offers to look into her soul, into her past and her present and her truth. She nods, throwing her arms wide, inviting them in. She has nothing to hide, and everything to show. It is like wind when the lady looks through her, like air brushing every piece of her, every corner of life and thought, every intention, every thing done in good and every done in ill. They have soaked for so long in in grief that they drip with it.

The lady looks at the lord and between them passes a language she cannot understand, does not want to understand. It instills in her a deep terror. It is knowledge she could not ever possess. They turn to her, inevitable eyes wavering, and they say she can have Laura back. They say she must fulfill their condition and she says she will do anything.

They tell her not to look back. They tell her to stand, return the way she came, up the misty stairs and into her world again. They tell her Laura will walk step by step behind her. They tell her she cannot see Laura until they are both in their world again. They tell her that should she fail, Laura will return to them and she will never see her again.

The gates swing shut behind her and her impatience returns, her hope flutters down from the walls of the palace to perch on her shoulder, whisper words through her. Carmilla remembers who she is, remembers Laura, remembers the good over the grief. It has been so long. It has been a day of forever and she cannot breathe with the knowing that it will be ended. Memories waltz through her body like blood, like the truth, like a promise of contentment.

Behind her, she can hear steps echoing her own. She does not look back. She walks straight ahead, stares only at the steps before her, taking them quickly. Laura follows her, she tells herself. It will be worth it. It will be over.

The world opens before her, feet on the wooden floor of her room, the sword in its box laying where she left it on her covers. If it is speaking she does not hear it. Carmilla turns on both feet, her eyes seeking Laura's, seeking a memory made real.

Laura stands behind her, smiling, reaching for her. Carmilla reaches back, fingers desperate to touch, to be touched, to feel the Laura's existence, to hold and be held, to know that she is real and Laura is real and love still lives in them, between them, to feel warm again, finally, to know that cold is not the only feeling left to her. She is an urgent happiness, a gasp of air after a suffocating nightmare. One of Laura's feet stands on the floor. The other still rests on the dark stair.

Carmilla sees again the darkness reaching around Laura's body, the nothingness spreading through her, claiming her, calling her its own, sees Laura vanishing from her world, consumed by the hollow around which reality bends, sees the emptiness moving through her body to her soul and Carmilla does not have time to scream. Laura is there and then she is not. Carmilla collapses into the abyss of Laura's absence, cold fingers untouched.


End file.
